Black Immigrant Daily News

By Sam Davis

Bioenergy is often seen as a more environmentally-friendly alternative to other forms of energy generation. But the truth is that it can actually be quite harmful to the environment. Bioenergy has a dark side: It contributes to air pollution.

Biomass, or bioenergy, creates energy by burning living materials like plants and trees. The wood pellet industry uses trees to make wood pellets. It then ships them to Europe and Asia and burns them in power plants to create electricity. Wood pellet plants are as dirty and problematic as coal plants.

Fossil fuel combustion in coal plants is the most common way that we produce electricity. But fossil fuels are responsible for increasing greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. Many countries have tried to pivot to renewable energy, but they’ve adopted bioenergy instead of truly low-carbon energies like wind and solar. This is mostly out of convenience because wood pellets can burn alongside fossil fuels like coal.

While many countries consider wood pellets “carbon neutral”, this is false. Greenhouse gas emissions from wood pellets–like carbon dioxide–are worse than coal. Europe and Asia are demanding wood pellets from the United States because it’s a “free pass” on their carbon accounting ledgers. But on the ground, burning biomass contributes to many air pollution impacts.

Traditional Biomass Burning Impacts

How do we know about the connection between biomass and air pollution? Biomass is most often used in developing countries to cook and heat the home. We’ve looked at indoor cooking smoke exposure to learn about the air pollution from burning wood. Before the 2010s, biomass was almost never used to generate household energy. Now the U.S. exports millions of tons of wood pellets every year to other countries despite the known health risks.

The household air pollution impacts from home wood burning are extensive. This domestic smoke pollution can cause:

acute lower respiratory infections
lung cancer (second only to smoking)
decreased respiratory health
exposure to carbon monoxide
increased risk of pneumonia and other acute respiratory infections
increased risk of COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease)

Air pollution from biomass is common in homes that heat with wood. But the industrial production and combustion of wood pellets for electricity cause many of these same impacts.

How Is Air Pollution From Bioenergy Generated?

Making wood pellets creates a variety of pollutants, including particulates (fine dust), carbon monoxide, nitrogen, and other hazardous air pollutants (HAPs). To make wood pellets, the bioenergy industry dries and crushes wood, which releases a lot of dust–also known as particulate air pollution.

Crushing wood can release other air pollution, too. For example, wood naturally contains formaldehyde. When the wood breaks down, it releases formaldehyde as fine particulate matter. This process releases other harmful chemicals as well.

Chopping wood won’t release a lot of air pollutants. Repeatedly crushing wood with big machines will. This type of dust is full of particulate air pollution, including

volatile organic compounds
specific health-damaging air pollutants like formaldehyde
fine particulate air pollution (PM 2.5 and below)

Wood pellet plants’ air permit applications usually list these air pollutants. Unfortunately, air permit applications are challenging to read. They can contain nearly a hundred pages of details.

Wood pellets also create particulate matter air pollution when they’re made. Biomass burning creates additional pollutants, too. This ambient air pollution in the destination countries is also an issue. Biomass smoke can release many of the same compounds described above. It also releases carbon dioxide, a potent greenhouse gas that fossil fuels also produce. You can see this outdoor air pollution in pictures of the Drax power station. You can see it in other bioenergy power stations all around the world.

Beyond the air pollution impacts, we also need to consider the residues after combustion. When wood pellets are burned alone, there’s evidence that the ashes contain significant heavy metals. These are a risk when considering disposal methods. When wood pellets are cofired with coal, it’s even worse. The combined ashes contain risks from both coal ash and wood ash.

We’re only now beginning to understand the public health risks of burning biomass.

Health Effects of Outdoor and Indoor Air Pollution

Pollutants like these cause many health problems. Fine dust, called PM2.5, is especially harmful. PM2.5 can get into the lungs and bloodstream. PM2.5 can hurt lung function, worsen asthma, and cause heart attacks and premature death:

Particulate matter harms boys and children with high BMI even more than other children.
Particular matter can cause airway inflammation, especially in asthmatic children.
Particulate matter affects people more strongly in combination with higher temperatures.
It can even harm folks with asthma and COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease).
PM2.5 was correlated with an increase in the risk of death from COVID-19.
Air pollution also contributes to cardiovascular disease.

Pellet production plants also release volatile organic compounds (VOCs). The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) calls some VOCs hazardous air pollutants (HAPs). This includes chemicals like acetaldehyde, formaldehyde, and methanol. HAPs are chemicals that are toxic or can cause cancer, even in small amounts. VOCs and HAPs cause health problems for children, the elderly, and people with asthma or COPD:

VOCs that make it indoors can harm lung function.
Folks exposed to organic solvents like formaldehyde frequently complain of respiratory symptoms.
Female woodworkers may be more susceptible to wood dust exposure.
Increased exposure to HAPs is associated with a 9% increase in COVID-19 deaths.

People living next to pellet plants often have a lower life expectancy and poorer health. According to the American Heart Association, “Short-term exposure to small particulate matter can trigger cardiovascular disease mortality and illness; long-term exposure reduces life expectancy up to a few years.”

What You Can Do About Air Pollution

Living in dirty air is hard and dangerous. If you live near one of these facilities, there are some things you can do:

Educate yourself and your community about the dangers of air pollution. You can use this downloadable fact sheet to help.
Monitor local air quality data to protect yourself on bad air days.
Install an air monitor on your property

If you have the privilege of not living next to a wood pellet plant or other biomass facility, consider yourself lucky, and get involved in the movement.

Credit Line: This article was produced by Earth Food

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Black Immigrant Daily News

The report Global Landscape of Renewable Energy Finance 2023 reveals that global investment in energy transition technologies last year–including energy efficiency–reached USD 1.3 trillion. It set a new record-high, up 19% from 2021 investment levels, and 50% from before the pandemic in 2019.

The joint report by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) and Climate Policy Initiative (CPI)–launched on the side-lines of the Spanish International Conference on Renewable Energy in Madrid–also finds that, although global investment in renewable energy reached a record high of USD 0.5 trillion in 2022, this still represents less than 40% of the average investment needed each year between 2021 and 2030, according to IRENA’s 1.5?C Scenario. Investments are also not on track to achieve the goals set by the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

Since decentralised solutions are vital in plugging the access gap to reach universal energy access to improve livelihoods and welfare under the 2030 Agenda, efforts must be made to scale up investments in the off-grid renewables sector. Despite reaching record-high annual investments exceeding USD 0.5 billion in 2021, investment in off-grid renewable solutions falls far short of the USD 2.3 billion needed annually in the sector between 2021 and 2030.

Furthermore, investments have become concentrated in specific technologies and uses. In 2020, solar photovoltaic alone attracted 43% of the total investment in renewables, followed by onshore and offshore wind at 35% and 12% shares, respectively. Based on preliminary figures, this concentration seems to have continued to the year of 2022. To best support the energy transition, more funds need to flow to less mature technologies as well as to other sectors beyond electricity such as heating, cooling, and system integration.

Comparing renewables financing across countries and regions, the report shows that glaring disparities have increased significantly over the last six years. About 70% of the world’s population, mostly residing in developing and emerging countries, received only 15% of global investments in 2020. Sub-Saharan Africa for example, received less than 1.5% of the amount invested globally between 2000 and 2020. In 2021, investment per capita in Europe was 127 times that in Sub-Saharan Africa, and 179 times more in North America.

The report emphasises how lending to developing countries looking to deploy renewables must be reformed, and highlights the need for public financing to play a much stronger role, beyond mitigating investment risks. Recognising the limited public funds available in the developing world, the report calls for stronger international collaboration, including a substantial increase in financial flows from the Global North to the Global South.

“For the energy transition to improve lives and livelihoods, governments and development partners need to ensure a more equitable flow of finance, by recognising the different contexts and needs,” says IRENA Director-General, Francesco La Camera. “This joint report underscores the need to direct public funds to regions and countries with a lot of untapped renewables potential but find it difficult to attract investment. International cooperation must aim at directing these funds to enabling policy frameworks, the development of energy transition infrastructure, and to address persistent socio-economic gaps.”

Achieving an energy transition in line with the 1.5?C Scenario also requires the redirection of USD 0.7 trillion per year from fossil fuels to energy-transition?-related technologies. But following a brief decline in 2020 due to COVID-19, fossil fuel investments are now on the rise. Some large multi-national banks have even increased their investments in fossil fuels at an average of about USD 0.75 trillion dollars a year since the Paris Agreement.

In addition, the fossil fuel industry continues to benefit from subsidies, which doubled in 2021 across 51 countries. The phasing out of investments in fossil fuel assets should be coupled with the elimination of subsidies to level the playing field with renewables. However, the phaseout of subsidies needs to be accompanied by a proper safety net to ensure adequate standards of living for vulnerable populations.

Barbara Buchner, CPI’s Global Managing Director says, “The path to net zero can only happen with a just and equitable energy transition. While our numbers show that there were record levels of investment for renewables last year, a greater scale-up is critically needed to avoid dangerous climate change, particularly in developing countries.”

This is the third edition of the biannual joint report by IRENA and CPI. This report series analyses investment trends by technology, sector, region, source of finance, and financial instrument. It also analyses financing gaps, aiming to support informed policy making to deploy renewables at the scale needed to accelerate the energy transition. This third edition looks at the period of 2013-2020 and provides preliminary insights and figures for 2021 and 2022.

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Black Immigrant Daily News

The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) released today the Statistical Yearbook for Latin America and the Caribbean 2022, available online, in which it presents a statistical synthesis that illustrates the socio-demographic, economic and environmental development of the region’s countries.

This annual publication, which is among the United Nations regional organization’s most important, constitutes a reference for those seeking descriptive statistical data that is comparable between countries and over time. The current edition contains information available as of mid-December 2022.

The Statistical Yearbook 2022 is divided into three chapters. The first explores demographic and social aspects, including indicators on population, work, education, health, housing and basic services, poverty and income distribution, and gender.

In the social realm, the Yearbook’s data shows a slight recovery in some indicators after the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2021, poverty in Latin America affected 32.3% of the population, including 12.9% of the population that was living in extreme poverty. These figures represent a small decline versus the prior year, of 0.5 percentage points in poverty and 0.2 points in extreme poverty.

The pandemic’s impact on employment continued despite a slight improvement in labor indicators. The population’s participation rate in economic activity for Latin America and the Caribbean rose to 61.4% in comparison with the minimum of 57.8% reached in 2020. In addition, the open unemployment rate declined, falling from 10.5% in 2020 to 9.3% in 2021. In both cases, however, the improvements seen in 2021 were not enough for these indicators to attain their pre-pandemic values.

The second chapter presents economic information referring to national accounts, balance of payments, foreign trade and price indices, among other indicators.

The Yearbook shows that in 2022, the region’s economies grew at an estimated 3.7%, marking nearly half the growth recorded in 2021 (6.7%). This reflects the dwindling of the rebound effect on the recovery in 2021, along with the impact and effects of restrictive monetary policies, greater limits on fiscal spending, lower consumption and investment levels, and a deterioration in the external context.

While growth decelerated in 2022, inflationary pressures held firm. The variation in the Consumer Price Index in Latin America reached 15.4% in 2022, above the 12.4% seen in 2021. Food prices, which have played a significant role in the evolution of the overall consumer price index, rose by 13.2% in 2022, compared with 8.3% in 2021. The behavior of regional inflation also correlates with the evolution of prices for primary products, which increased by 16.6% between January and October 2022 versus the prior year, with particularly striking price growth of 45.9% for energy products, 36.8% for fertilizers and 19.5% for food and beverages.

The region’s complex domestic scenario is compounded by a difficult situation in the external sector. In 2021, Latin America and the Caribbean had a current account deficit in its balance of payments of 1.5% of GDP, with a deterioration in the trade balance of the region as a whole, influenced by growth of 34.7% in goods imports, which exceeded the 27.7% expansion for goods exports. However, in 2021 foreign direct investment experienced a recovery with 14.0% growth in net flows versus the 20.4% drop seen in 2020.

The third chapter offers environmental statistics and indicators from the region. These include metrics on physical conditions; land cover; ecosystems; biodiversity; environmental quality; land; energy, water and biological resources; emissions; disasters; human settlements; and environmental regulation and governance.

Historically, Latin America and the Caribbean has contributed less than other regions to climate change. However, the countries in this region are very vulnerable to its negative consequences: floods, storms, droughts and landslides, among others. In 2022 alone, 74 hazardous events and disasters occurred, directly affecting more than 7 million people and causing the death of more than 1,000 people. The total damage and economic losses related directly or indirectly to disasters in 2022 in our region amounted to $1.789 billion dollars.

On another note, it can be seen that since 1990, the region increased its accumulated aquaculture production by more than 1,547%, going from 229,611 tonnes in 1990 to 3,781,004 tonnes as of 2020. Meanwhile, fish extraction declined by 22%. All of this points to less pressure on these natural resources, leading to a less unfavorable impact on the environment.

Finally, this edition of the Statistical Yearbook includes information on environmental quality in the region through air quality (air pollution), which represents a significant environmental risk to human health. The results indicate that just 30% of the region’s countries (10 out of 33) comply with the World Health Organization’s guidelines for particulate matter (PM2.5) and, unfortunately, 5 countries have more than double the maximum value permitted.

The Statistical Yearbook is published in a print version and an online format that include a selection of tables and graphs aimed at providing a summary of the statistical information from a regional perspective. The interactive web version facilitates navigation and access to the information presented in the print version, linking graphs and statistical tables to the data series available in ECLAC’s databases, which allows for accessing information that is more detailed and refers to a much broader historical period. It also contains an additional chapter explaining methodological aspects and specifying the references to the data sources used.

The information underpinning the Yearbook is part of the set of statistics available on CEPALSTAT, a platform that gives access to all the updated statistical information from the region’s countries that is collected, systematized and published by ECLAC, enabling visualization of the region’s statistics in distinct territories through its Geoportal.

Given that most of this information comes from national statistics offices, central banks, international bodies and other official institutions, ECLAC invites users to pay attention to the sources and the technical notes presented in this publication. The data is obtained using international methodologies and standards with the aim of ensuring the greatest possible comparability between countries, which means that these figures may not necessarily coincide with national data.

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Black Immigrant Daily News

The decision by the Government of St. Kitts and Nevis to provide focused attention to the Federation’s youth, the elderly and differently-abled population was applauded by Cosbert Woods, United Nations Country Coordinator for St. Kitts and Nevis.

Woods’ comments were made at the official launch of the Ministry of Youth Empowerment, Ageing and Disabilities on Monday. In delivering the feature address, the UN representative credited the formation of the new Ministry.

“The formation of a dedicated Ministry to tackle the developmental and sustainable needs of the most vulnerable in our society is extremely critical at this time when we are grappling with global conflict, climate change, food insecurity and financial hardships,” said Woods.

“More specific to our national context, St. Kitts and Nevis as a Small Island Developing State (SIDS), is highly susceptible to a wide range of socio-economic shocks which place a huge burden on our limited capacity as a country.”

Woods noted that the goals of the Ministry of Youth Empowerment, Ageing and Disabilities are in line with several United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

“We believe that the strategies and proposed activities outlined… are closely aligned to several UN SDGs geared towards achieving equality, preserving well-being and ensuring that no one is left behind,” he said.

“Our recent work in the Federation has revealed that there are strong expectations from the youth, elderly and persons with disabilities regarding the work to be undertaken by the government to support them.”

He noted that the UN Secretary-General Ant?nio Guterres stresses the need for transformation in 2023, which is grounded in the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

As such, the UN encourages the Ministry of Youth Empowerment, Ageing and Disabilities to “adopt a human rights-based approach to their work which recognizes the importance of addressing different segments of the population in vulnerable situations and unlocking socio-economic opportunities for development which considers factors such as age, disability, ethnicity, health status and place of residence.”

The United Nations Country Coordinator added that the organization is very pleased to support the Ministry and to “build on the recent work undertaken in the Federation.” Mr. Woods pledged the UN’s continued support in providing technical support for activities such as the “development of a Youth Engagement Strategy and Action Plan Climate Change which will also feed onto the new Youth Policy, as well as the disaster risk management work programme.”

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